What you say

Oh my Jesus Christ.

Oh actually I have a really funny story about the five-year-old swearing in Pennsylvania last week, remind me later.

Our kitchen looks a lot like a barn right now. You can see the roof, for one thing, and the inside of the outside walls if that makes any sense, and, across the back, the floor isn't there! They took it away because, well it went like this:

Contractor Mike, frowning at the back of the house: Now that the deck is gone, I'm looking at your kitchen floor, and do you see that sag?
Me: Yyyes.
Mike: Well it looks like when the previous owners enclosed the back porch and made it part of the kitchen, they took out a support.
Me: Yeah, that's always looked like that. Did you not know about that when you wrote your bid?
Mike: No, no I didn't.
Me: [Sigh]
Mike: We can fix that, we'll fix it.
Me: Yeah, I know.

So the kitchen floor is open so that they can shove a beam in there and keep the kitchen from falling into the backyard.

We spent the weekend in our house, but I took the kids to my parents' house after school yesterday and we're going to sleep there all week. The kitchen cabinets get delivered Wednesday, and they're putting them in the LIVING ROOM thank you very much, and they don't get installed until Feb 11, so I imagine we will be living out of the minivan for a while. Right now I'm living in a coffee house in our neighborhood, because my parents live clear across town and if schools are going to close 2 hours early it's not worth driving all the way back there and then back here.

You see, we're having a little snow. Really. A LITTLE snow. And this has closed schools entirely for most of the state, Baltimore City being the exception.

For a while there my husband Bob was the Director of Facilities for the Baltimore City School System, so he was one of the people who decided whether weather would close school. We used to get a phone call at 4:30am and Bob would like, roll over and look out the window and go like, "Uhhh...". He was never gonna close school. He's from Cleveland, and out there, if the snow isn't actively trying to cling to you and take you down like a swarm of attacking bees, you can't really call it weather.

On the bright side, the basement will be all but done as of beginning of next week, so maybe we'll just live down there. And until today's snow, I was hoping the deck guys would finish the deck this week. It would be nice to get the grill out of the POD so that we could cook something other than rice and toast.

Overheard from downstairs yesterday:
[scream of reciprocating saw on metal]
Contractor Scott: Ok, it's cut!
Contractor Mike: No, it's not!
Scott: Yeah I just cut it!
Mike: What did you cut?
Scott: SHIT!
Mike: That was the gas line!
Scott: SHIT!

So we may not have heat either for a while. So I am at the coffee house. Also, yesterday I developed this massive headache because I spent the morning priming the drywall in the basement bathroom, and they had this like jet-engine gas heater going down there to thaw out some lumber that had gotten wet and froze, and the fumes, they made my head feel funny.

Hee hee.